The application of range imaging for improved local feature representations

This thesis presents an investigation into the integration of information extracted from co-aligned range and intensity images to achieve pose invariant object recognition. Local feature matching is a fundamental technique in image analysis that underpins many computer vision-based applications; the approach comprises identifying a collection of interest points in an image, characterising the local image region surrounding the interest point by means of a descriptor, and matching these descriptors between example images. Such local feature descriptors are formed from a measure of the local image statistics in the region surrounding the interest point. The interest point locations and the means of measuring local image statistics should be chosen such that resultant descriptor remains stable across a range of common image transformations. Recently the availability of low cost, high quality range imaging devices has motivated an interest in local feature extraction from range images. It has been widely assumed in the vision community that the range imaging domain has properties which remain quasi-invariant through a wide range of changes in illumination and pose. Accordingly, it has been suggested that local feature extraction in the range domain should allow the calculation of local feature descriptors that are potentially more robust than those calculated from the intensity imaging domain alone. However, range images represent differing characteristics from those represented within intensity images which are frequently used, independently from range images, to create robust local features. Therefore, this work attempts to establish the best means of combining information from these two imaging modalities to further increase the reliability of matching local features. Local feature extraction comprises a series of processes applied to an image location such that a collection of repeatable descriptors can be established. By using co-aligned range and intensity images this work investigates the choice of modality and method for each step in the extraction process as an approach to optimising the resulting descriptor. Additionally, multimodal features are formed by combining information from both domains in a single stage in the extraction process. To further improve the quality of feature descriptors, a calculation of the surface normals and a use of the 3D structure from the range image are applied to correct the 3D appearance of a local sample patch, thereby increasing the similarity between observations. The matching performance of local features is evaluated using an experimental setup comprising a turntable and stereo pair of cameras. This experimental setup is used to create a database of intensity and range images for 5 objects imaged at 72 calibrated viewpoints, creating a database of 360 object observations. The use of a calibrated turntable in combination with the 3D object surface coordiantes, supplied by the range image allow location correspondences between object observations to be established; and therefore descriptor matches to be labelled as either true positive or false positive. Applying this methodology to the formulated local features show that two approaches demonstrate state-of-the-art performance, with a ~40% increase in area under ROC curve at a False Positive Rate of 10% when compared with standard SIFT. These approaches are range affine corrected intensity SIFT and element corrected surface gradients SIFT. Furthermore,this work uses the 3D structure encoded in the range image to organise collections of interest points from a series of observations into a collection of canonical views in a new model local feature. The canonical views for a interest point are stored in a view compartmentalised structure which allows the appearance of a local interest point to be characterised across the view sphere. Each canonical view is assigned a confidence measure based on the 3D pose of the interest point at observation, this confidence measure is then used to match similar canonical views of model and query interest points thereby achieving a pose invariant interest point description. This approach does not produce a statistically significant performance increase. However, does contribute a validated methodology for combining multiple descriptors with differing confidence weightings into a single keypoint

Vehicle make and model recognition in CCTV footage

This paper presents a novel approach to Vehicle Make & Model Recognition in CCTV video footage. CPD (coherent Point Drift) is used to effectively remove skew of vehicles detected as CCTV cameras are not specifically configured for the VMMR (Vehicle Make and Model Recognition) task and may capture vehicles at different approaching angles. Also a novel ROI (Region Of Interest) segmentation is proposed. A LESH (Local Energy Shape Histogram) feature based approach is used for vehicle make and model recognition with the novelty that temporal processing is used to improve reliability. A number of further algorithms are used to maximize the reliability of the fnal outcome. Experimental results are provided to prove that the proposed system demonstrates accuracy over 95% when tested in real CCTV footage with no prior camera calibration

A Quaternionic Wavelet Transform-based Approach for Object Recognition

Recognizing the objects in complex natural scenes is the challenging task as the object may be occluded, may vary in shape, position and in size. In this paper a method to recognize objects from different categories of images using quaternionic wavelet transform (QWT) is presented. This transform separates the information contained in the image better than a traditional Discrete wavelet transform and provides a multiscale image analysis whose coefficients are 2D analytic, with one near-shift invariant magnitude and three phases. The two phases encode local image shifts and the third one contains texture information. In the domain of object recognition, it is often to classify objects from images that make only limited part of the image. Hence to identify local features and certain region of images, patches are extracted over the interest points detected from the original image using Wavelet based interest point detector. Here QWT magnitude and phase features are computed for every patch. Then these features are trained, tested and classified using SVM classifier in order to have supervised learning model. In order to compare the performance of local feature with global feature, the transform is applied to the entire image and the global features are derived. The performance of QWT is compared with discrete wavelet transform (DWT) and dual tree discrete wavelet transform (DTDWT). Observations revealed that QWT outperforms the DWT and shift invariant DTDWT with lesser equal error rate. The experimental evaluation is done using the complex Graz databases.Defence Science Journal, Vol. 64, No. 4, July 2014, pp. 350-357, DOI:http://dx.doi.org/10.14429/dsj.64.450

Building Tourism and Sociopetal Cultural Understanding Through Proxemics Sharing of Authentic Artefacts from the Tongkonan of North Toraja, Indonesia

Existing theories of intercultural communication recognize each communication act as an authentic space that is filled with symbols thathave cultural context. In the sense, that a group of signs will have different meanings for people of different cultures. In proxemics theory,sociofugal and sociopetal axis explain nonverbal factors of a place, which can attract or restrain the engagement of people in communications.Tongkonan, the dominant culture in the Indonesian region of North Toraja, has frightening death symbols, which have become amajor attraction and talking point for visitors. Travellers observe and learn about these symbols and are also encouraged to share thislearning with friends and relatives. The North Toraja tourism industry has come to recognize that this word of mouth promotion is moreeffective than media coverage in promoting both tourism and cultural awareness among outsider communities. This research involvedobservation study plus interviews with tourists in Kete Kesu Village in North Toraja in order to found interest both local Indonesian andinternational tourists in interacting with fixed-feature space, semi fixed-feature space, and person-to-person space in Tongkonan. A numberof typical Tongkonan symbols such as buffalo horns, human skulls and jaws of animal victims, that normally restrain the desire ofpeople to communicate, in this case, become an attraction in intercultural communication

A Metaheuristic for Amortized Search in High-Dimensional Parameter Spaces

Parameter inference for dynamical models of (bio)physical systems remains a challenging problem. Intractable gradients, high-dimensional spaces, and non-linear model functions are typically problematic without large computational budgets. A recent body of work in that area has focused on Bayesian inference methods, which consider parameters under their statistical distributions and therefore, do not derive point estimates of optimal parameter values. Here we propose a new metaheuristic that drives dimensionality reductions from feature-informed transformations (DR-FFIT) to address these bottlenecks. DR-FFIT implements an efficient sampling strategy that facilitates a gradient-free parameter search in high-dimensional spaces. We use artificial neural networks to obtain differentiable proxies for the model's features of interest. The resulting gradients enable the estimation of a local active subspace of the model within a defined sampling region. This approach enables efficient dimensionality reductions of highly non-linear search spaces at a low computational cost. Our test data show that DR-FFIT boosts the performances of random-search and simulated-annealing against well-established metaheuristics, and improves the goodness-of-fit of the model, all within contained run-time costs

Rapid Online Analysis of Local Feature Detectors and Their Complementarity

A vision system that can assess its own performance and take appropriate actions online to maximize its effectiveness would be a step towards achieving the long-cherished goal of imitating humans. This paper proposes a method for performing an online performance analysis of local feature detectors, the primary stage of many practical vision systems. It advocates the spatial distribution of local image features as a good performance indicator and presents a metric that can be calculated rapidly, concurs with human visual assessments and is complementary to existing offline measures such as repeatability. The metric is shown to provide a measure of complementarity for combinations of detectors, correctly reflecting the underlying principles of individual detectors. Qualitative results on well-established datasets for several state-of-the-art detectors are presented based on the proposed measure. Using a hypothesis testing approach and a newly-acquired, larger image database, statistically-significant performance differences are identified. Different detector pairs and triplets are examined quantitatively and the results provide a useful guideline for combining detectors in applications that require a reasonable spatial distribution of image features. A principled framework for combining feature detectors in these applications is also presented. Timing results reveal the potential of the metric for online applications. © 2013 by the authors; licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland

Salient Regions for Query by Image Content

Much previous work on image retrieval has used global features such as colour and texture to describe the content of the image. However, these global features are insufficient to accurately describe the image content when different parts of the image have different characteristics. This paper discusses how this problem can be circumvented by using salient interest points and compares and contrasts an extension to previous work in which the concept of scale is incorporated into the selection of salient regions to select the areas of the image that are most interesting and generate local descriptors to describe the image characteristics in that region. The paper describes and contrasts two such salient region descriptors and compares them through their repeatability rate under a range of common image transforms. Finally, the paper goes on to investigate the performance of one of the salient region detectors in an image retrieval situation